Uniķ Democrātica de Catalunya (UDC), the most conservative of all the catalanocentric political parties, has been led for two decades by the lawyer Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida. The contrast of this Demochristian's intense defence of 'family values' in public, with his rumoured fondness for (paid) ladies in private, long ago gave rise to the joke that Duran is Christian from the waist up and a democrat from the waist down. Thanks to his latest poster campaign we can now also say of him - this time with gossip-free certainty - that he is one lousy writer.
Take for example, his slogan concerning immigration: 'People don't leave their country because they want to, but because they're hungry. But there isn't space for everybody in Catalonia'. Right underneath this simplistic insinuation that every single member of Catalonia's million-strong foreign population is an undernourished desperado who has flooded into the country uninvited, lurks the all-purpose campaign adage: 'They shall respect Catalonia', which reads here like a direct threat to any outsider who gets lippy (in fact, 'they' refers to the politicians in Madrid, but is so poorly contextualised that misunderstandings are inevitable). To make matters worse, the whole is topped off by a striking image of Duran's follically-challenged, not-unMussolini-like head. For those self-confessed 'non-nationalists' who are wont to accuse any support of things Catalan as xenophobic or even fascist, Duran's poster is manipulable manna from heaven. Before they start bad-mouthing, however, perhaps they should take into account that - his Catalanish rhetoric notwithstanding - Duran spends a fair percentage of his speeches attacking any move towards Catalan independence, almost certainly because his driving ambition is, and always has been, to become a minister in a Spanish government. One in which, presumably, there is space for absolutely anybody.